Luca Lorenzon

  • Luca Lorenzon graduated in Classical Languages in 2019. After writing his Master's thesis on the cult dedicated to Seleucid rulers, he spent 10 months at the Collegio dei Fiamminghi in Bologna, funded by the Jean Jacobs scholarship. He is currently preparing a doctoral thesis at the University of Liège under the joint supervision of Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge (ULiège - Collège de France) and Stefano Caneva (Università di Padova). His research focuses on the cult honors paid to human beings in ancient Greece. More specifically, he is interested in how the Greeks themselves conceived ritual practices establishing an equivalence between the recipients of cultic honors and traditional divinities. He also contributes to the Collection of Greek Ritual Norms (CGRN) and Practicalities of Hellenistic Ruler Cults (PHRC) projects.

    • Université de Liège

    • Università di Padova

  • The bestowal of cultic honours on political leaders and great benefactors is one of the most salient features of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. For a long time, the cults paid to these human figures were considered to be a form of opportunistic flattery that was more political than religious, echoing the criticisms raised by Greek and Roman intellectuals from Antiquity. The research of recent decades has taken the issue more seriously into consideration with an approach that no longer ignores religion.
    My researches aim to better understand the way in which the ancients represented the articulation between the gods, as traditional recipients of rituals, and the new human recipients of cultic honours. At this end, I mainly focus my attention on the religious language used to discuss these practices. I intend to clarify the issues involved in the use of terms and ideas, by analyzing the scope of the semantic changes that affected them both in the epigraphic texts and in the intellectuals’ discussions along the Hellenistic and imperial periods.

  • - History of the Eastern Mediterranean in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods
    - Greek religion in the Hellenistic and Imperial periods
    - Relations between human and divine power
    - Cultural interactions in the Eastern Mediterranean